Ah, come on, it's broken but it's very easy to fix: just take your soldering iron and... nevermind.

The "quick release" power cable is a safety feature ;-)

Wow, that's a lot of metal and assembly for $1 :) Given the cost constraints, I'm pretty impressed by the build quality.

they didnt solder them wires on because they dont even trust using their own soldering irons to do the job .

i want this guy to read me stories every night

I live in Thailand and bought one of these yesterday as an emergency soldering iron. It cost me 20 Baht or about $ .60 US from a 20Baht store (similar to a $1.00 Store). The first thing I did was measure the wattage and my unit showed 31 watts versus the sticker that said 40 Watts. Here in Thailand we run on 220 volts AC. The iron actually works fairly well, heating up time as expected is long but it does solder. This is no substitute to a soldering station but in a pinch will do the job.

As an adolescent I bought such a cheap soldering iron from the bargain bin at the local hardware store. I lasted less than an hour before the heating element burned out. The store proprietor was kind enough to give me a replacement, but it didn't fare any better. Since then, I've preferred Weller industrial soldering stations. Repair parts are readily available and they hold up for hundreds to thousands of hours of use.

I took a cheep 4$ harbor freight soldering iron and replaced the tip with solid copper wire (AWG 6 I think) and plugged it into a dimmer got decent results.

The mind boggles! Thanks for the video Clive, you got a really nice mention the other day on aVe.

Very few of the cheaper soldering irons in the US have an earth/ground.

That looks even worse than the crappy soldering irons they sell in Homebase, probably doesn't even last any more than 5 minutes. None of the ones I got ever did.

im not sure how i ended here but i have the same one i bought from ebay and have used it on and off for 3 years now and wirks well

Define irony, a soldering iron that contains cables are not soldered. Great videos, love your presentation. Keep up the great work.

I have one of these, only mine slightly melts the plastic and the heating element not only burns electronics but also sends electricity through it. I can't wait to get a new better one

I swear if i had the money i would buy this guy everything he need to take his quality to the next level.. Editing PC, lighting, mics, cameras, etc! Man, you have a VERY unique channel! Gold play button incoming!

I have an identical looking one in blue, in which the wire was indeed zigzagged around the strain relief thing as you thought it should be. Also the wire is crimped on to on terminals attached to the black plastic piece and heat-shrunk. Gotten that nearly 15 years ago in a dollar store like thing in France, served me well until I gotten a proper thing recently.

Thank you for this video, Clive.

I bet this would TIG your connections real good.

Shouldn't youmultiply the power by 0.7 (cos phi) to ge the power factor right or am i missing something?

I'm glad you did this, because I have a question. A friend of mine got a desolderring pump that looks similar to this but it is for 220 volts. Is it possible to convert it to 100??

Which size of ware I can use please help me

soldering irons generally use insulated nichrome/possibly kanthol right? do you know if there is a decent source of insulated heating wire?

So is there something complicated about adding an earth connection and would it be an OK soldering iron if you did?

Interesting video. But for 99p, its not going to be the best quality in the world. Also I think these cheaper irons would be much safer on 12 volts than 240v as if those wires come off like they did in this video. Having 240v up ones arm isn't going to be pretty.

What's the cheapest soldering iron you would recommend for basic uses? I have some random DIY projects to do and hot glue is not cutting it...

New to electronics question: i have a basic 2 pin soldering iron, would replacing the wire with a 3 core with ground to the barrel solve the earthing issue?

This looks better at first than the one I got in the mid 2017 from eBay for $2, was soldering and the wires came out just like this but they had put one tiny spot of solder on the very thin tip of the wires no stripped wires etc

are 12v soldering irons any good,? for keeping in the boot of a car for example,.. not as a main soldering iron.

The bits are interesting. I'm used to lovely Weller soldering iron bits (copper core, iron coated, plated, tinned, etc.) These cheap irons come with effectively a nail which corrodes *really* fast.

Hey Clive, found your vids recently and I'm really enjoying them. I live in Switzerland and relative frequently travel to the UK, but have always been too cheap/lazy to buy enough adapters, so have always just shoved the swiss two-prong plugs (edit: euro-plugs) into the British sockets after pushing something thin and non-conductive into the earth to disable those little safety blockers (while the socket is off and removing it once the plug is in, of course). I have never had any problems with this, but have been wondering if it safe to do or not. (Of course it isn't "safe", but is it safe enough?)

Do these soldering iron use nichrome wire to heat them?

My wife got me a cheap Pyrography kit to play with once (it is essentially a soldering iron with different shaped tips) and It turns out that I'm not artistic enough to use it. I also have a 3d printer (cheap yet again) and have tried to use all sorts of methods to to smooth out the layers. Then it hit me, use the "pyro" iron to melt the top layers. Needless to say, it was too hot and made a mess of my prints. Now for my question, could I use a dimmer switch to control the temperature of the iron? Sorry for the long story.

I bought one of these a few months back, it seemed to work fine at first, but then the handle started to melt, and it was glowing red hot inside.

now you need to tell us whats the best size solder to use as there are so many .also like to say I love the vid with the clock kit made me send for one to try.

I had pretty much the same happen to this cheap "desoldering tools" (your normal plunger solder sucker + a hollow heated tip). The wires were just losely twisted together and i think I may get 4 or 5 more uses out of it before it melts itself.

When you use your battery iron... how do toy earth it?

Here in the USA, simple things like soldering irons are almost never grounded(earthed). Even electric hair dryers and vacuum cleaners are rarely grounded. When I ordered a British made Antex XS25 soldering iron(which I might add blows my old Weller out of the water) I was very surprised to get a three-prong plug. It is in my opinion more of an inconvenience as half my house is outfitted with un-grounded two-prong outlets. Only the kitchen circuits were retrofitted as they see high usage.

I have that exact solder. It cost around 0.80 USD, and i use it to replace a microswitch in my mouse, which was double clicking. It's not bad, and it's still running ok. I use this to fix loose soldering, basic repair and such.

I have had more of the same cheap soldering iron. On them was 25W / 220V but I used each of them only once because the heater immediately burned. I tried to connect a diode in series to reduce the voltage to the heater but did not help. I tried and transformer 220/110 but that did not help too. Fortunately they were cheap and still keep one piece.

do you have video about the expensive one? i would love to watch it. really help me to learning what's the diffrence. and thank you for this and the other video.

what s inside those 25w solderon iron, i guess its a solid state no coil device.

Please tell me which wire we use for soldering???

I've got one as a spare, but I modded it by adding a 3-core cable, it was a pain, but still for a couple of quid what do you expect.

I am wondering if anyone can help me, i have 3 to 4 dead soldering irons , they die because i unplug them and replug them several times during work to prevent the tip from staying hot for too long and oxidising. how can i fix these solderign irons. or should i buy a new one

I recently purchased the cheapest 60 watt iron I could find on Ebay. It shares the same plug as yours without "holes" in the tips for hot and neutral. Also, the plastic handle gets hot. But it does work. The Harbor Freight irons are only 30 watt, but they are also pretty good.

Which budget iron would you recommend these days?

since you had removed the cable would it have been hard to add an Ground your self?

how much power does a usual soldering iron take?

weller soldering station whs40 for 125Eur has no earthing as 90% of soldering irons. They use simple 2 wire cable. So how can you expect 0.99 iron to be grounded?

I got one like this and it didn't get hot enough I've never seen an iron with a ground wire here.Unless it was a station.Mine doesn't have insides like that though.

Are soldering irons with the screw-on sheath good?

What is coil made out of?

I maybe wouldn't trust that iron either, but i would trust the rcd/rcbo that trips the circuit... Or would I? Off topic a little but ive seen rcbo's fail safe, does that mean they can fail unsafe??. I'm still on wired fuses lol.

can we get a link to your screwdriver set?

Following your glowing review I got myself one of these! I was impressed with the build quality and mine had the special feature where the handle & soldering iron end would wiggle when pressure was applied. Undeterred I plugged it in, it started oozing smoke from two of the holes on the metal body. One hole was a steady flow of toxicity while the other was just a half hearted attempt which wouldn't score higher than a 3 from an olympic judge. After about three minutes I measured the temperature of the tip with my thermal probe - an impressive 280 degrees and rising slowly. So I thought time to attempt some actual soldering/desoldering. I hovered my smoking tool over an old motherboard and touched the tip to the grounding tabs of the usb socket assembly and pressed firmly to compensate for the built in wiggle feature. I waited and after about ten seconds I could see the surface of the solder changing colour with and the iron also ceased smoking - Hurrah I thought! But then nothing else happened, so I pressed harder, waited, still nothing. Then I moved the tip to a smaller solder joint, pressed and waited - nothing. I decided to do my unique soldering iron tip temperature test where I move closer the tip end of the soldering iron body parallel to my lips to gauge a rough idea of the temperature - not very hot was the response from my lips! I applied my thermal probe to the tip and it stated 87 degrees and falling. After unplugging, waiting and trying again, it seemed like my wiggly wobbly Chinese soldering iron had gone to 99p heaven. So to conclude, I had enjoyed a ten minute mini toxic smoke-display and almost managed to melt a solder joint (to be fair it was a bigun) with my 3D direction adjustable body soldering iron before it expired. :-( On the plus side my mains lead seems to be firmly attached!

if you read this BC i would love to see you get your solder suckers out in a vid. talking about their usage, and weaknesses and strengths., i am still considering a posh powered one for winkling soldered ICs, and while we are at it i wish to buy a microscope for soldering, i can't decide whether to forgo 3d with one using a screen, or buy a binocular set. I'd be interested to know if your lab contains such a thing.

I might retire my fx951 and invest in one of these lil beautiful beasts!

Could i use this to solder my CPU?

I bought one for fun too, it's still the cheapect one in 2021 at less than £3 to your door, the heating element for this generic 30w iron is £1 on it's own and it fits a few different el-cheapos. The screw in the handle hilt gets bloody hot but I worked round it by putting a different one in it and then adding strain relief and a new better and longer cable, no earth but I used it for a day or two, also The metal part that holds the tip is sheet steel and curved to fit and within a day it had opened up, strange how you HAVE to mod Chinese crap like this just to get it a bit safer to use, great video Clive.

I picked up an iron similar to this, the handle looked a bit nicer though and it was £4. I got it as a challenge. I had to use it to build a power supply from scratch, then build a soldering station using a wacky knock off 908 handle then use that to make a full blown re-work station. A 3 in One using an old computer case. It was a fun project though I will never ever ever use a cheap iron again. Having seen the inside of that one now, I am really glad I didn't open mine up.

I love the fact that the wires are twisted together inside the metal bits... And.... the other end leads to an unfused plug...

I had one and it worked on for a few days then literally exploded when the wires at the plug came out and made contact with eachother

wow love that enormous meter display

I've used these a thousand times and have never had a problem other than the tips corroding really fast with daily use. The ones here in the States are $1 and have a black handle. Rated at 30w/110v

I had gotten a trisonic brand soldering iron from a dollar store near me, much like the design of this one. The mica foil got everywhere. I added this videos link in the teardown video of my iron. Keep doing these vids, I feel things like this should be exposed for there lack of care and quality.

I have a very similar soldering iron and the problem with it is it actually melts down the plastic that holds the hot tip and I am stuck with a mutated iron where I have to kinda hold it at an angle just to have it dangle over whatever I am soldering, it's seriously annoying. However, I am also not going to pay $100 just for a decent soldering iron.

hi clive! can u advise where to i connect the grounding wire from my soldering iron to? tks!

The cheapest soldering iron I ever took to bits didn't even have as substantial of a handle as this, but it actually had a ceramic heater and a pair of binding posts for the wires...

How could you expect an earth connection with a 2 prong wall plug??

Take it to bits! Never heard that one before, I like it

no video of the 240v water heater in sale water?

What screwdriver set are you using? (anyone can answer) Is it the ifixit set?

How much the wattage of soldering iron (50w,30w)

Bought a cheap iron myself. Probably should serve as a heads-up to people about cheap irons. Mine had a ground pin on the plug, but when I opened the plug, the ground pin wasn't actually connected to anything; horrible. Inside the plug was also a 13A fuse. A 13A fuse on a 40W device... scary stuff.

I bought it loccally fo 2 bucks and pluged it in worked for 30s min and the heatig element died im thiking it was a 120v version

I have one similar to this. It just died. It's not the twisted connection, so I guess the steel wire failed somehow.

Interesting you talk about the grounded tip, I have only seen 1 iron like that and it was a very specialty one my late Grandfather had...everything I have seen for sale is just 2-prong.

is the main lead a North American plug? The reason I ask is because when calculating resistance you used 220v but North American systems use 110v (or 120v depending on who you talk to)

When you opened it I immediately thought "Looks like they used a 99p iron to solder the other irons' wires!"- canna believe they were just twisted together, it's so bad it's great 😂😂😂

I bought one here in America for $1.00 at a dollar store. It's built the same way as this one here, it takes about 2-3 minutes to heat up enough to melt solder and I use it as my go to when I'm doing desolder Work. So far it's worked well.

Hey what classes are recommended to take in high school in dealing with electricity and computers? i know i could just google it myself, but in just asking just incase someone else asks :3

The resistance of metal wires actually goes up when they heat up. That iron is nowhere near the claimed 40 W. The TCR of nichrome (typical heating wire) is about 400 ppm/K. Heating it up to about 400°C would increase the the resistance by 160000 ppm which is 16%. That 1.898 kΩ would then be 2.20 kΩ at temperature, so the actual power is 230²/2.20 kΩ = 24 W.

I sent the iron to Dave (eevBlog), similar to this one. There are similar irons for £3.50 in CPCs catalog with UK plugs (and I assume, better construction)?

Is it not impedance as it's AC or would it be the same as the resistance you measured? Genuine question.

This looks like one made for 100-120v at 60hz. USA does not require grounding on everything. This would explain the lack of grounding and the US style plug. I have seen a ton of ungrounded radio shack branded ones.

Don't forget some of us use them for things like model railways and models generally, and the earth is not so important. I keep cheap ones as backups, and have about 10 types of irons! I nearly always swap the tip for one made from phosphor bronze rod, they wear, but retain the tinning. Asl these cheap irons are good on dimmers to give a low temperature iron, for 145c solder and sub 100c solder like woods alloy. Stephen.

Do american irons have earth connections? I thought all their electrical equipment was based on fuses in a fuse box, rather than in the plug or earth lead to flip the mains off..

in around 90 or early 2000, in Indonesia, so many soldering iron's model like this. But the filament made not like that (in this video), still more secure. But when i bought the similar one around 2011, and want to join my components, i got electric shocked !!! I opened like you did and whoala... similar like in this video. both of them, same China made but the last one more cheaper. Around 90s it cost about 20 dollar but now only 5-6 dollar. Cheap and everyone who bought this also price theirself so cheap for safety.

seeing you touch the metal fills me with dread every time because I expect to get burnt

I've seen soldering irons in a dollar store. It wasn't a chain but an independent one. I was really surprised because for a dollar something like that didn't sound very safe.

I'm using the soldering iron for about 1 year and it works excellent

What is the white tube around the wire called?

How do you print the Ebay listing/report ? Anyone know ?

Here in Thailand this iron is sold in the 20 Baht store for 60 cents US. (20Baht)

i got some of them from the dollar store 1ce got about 6 of them they worked ok for a little wood burning but only lasted about 1 or 2 weeks each and 1 of them straight up exploded while was resting on the desk

I brought the same iron out of curiosity and for giggles. How they manage to make, ship and make a profit on that is bewildering to me. It was dead on arrival, I didn't bother taking it apart.

Makes the cheapest one from Harbor Freight Tools seem legit.

so you have to buy a couple, so you can solder your soldering iron?

Interesting video, but I think you missed a trick there Clive.... element to metal housing resistance. That would have been my first test. Keep em coming!

0:43 Look, the eBay ad picture even shows the wires broken off. lol!